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Hey all,

One of my friends is trying to drag me into AoS (they just won a tourney with Sylvaneth this weekend), and I figured if I was gonna jump in I'd land with the knife-ears

I don't have the rulebook, the generals handbook (wait, is that the main book now?), the Order book (which I'm guessing is the army book that contains my elves), so forgive me if this question is covered in those.

As a competitive/bound (forgive the 40k jargon) army list, can I mix and match sub-factions? Can I have exiles (dark elves) with my wanderers (wood elves), palling around with my highborn (high elves)?

What can I say, I like elves with my elves, and some more elves..... because elves.

Thanks for the read all, take care.

¬Lady Mournival

Well, to answer your questions here.

First, for your armies, your best bet is the AoS app. That contains all the warscrolls, as well as those from expansion books. But instead of buying the whole book, you only need to pay for the warscrolls you want (at about $2 per scroll). The app gives all of the rules for each unit. For your points, you need the General's Handbook, either the physical copy or the app copy (app copy comes with army building built in).

As far as mixing and matching in Match Play (the term used for points play), you can draw from anything under your grand alliance (Order, in the case of Aelfs). However, your army has a required amount of units that are Battleline. For some units, they are always Battleline, but for some Allegiances (aka subfactions in Order), you'll need to meet certain requirements to unlock units as Battleline. The example for me is the Order Serpentis, an Order Allegiance that focuses on Dark Elf dragon units. Normally, it has nothing that is Battleline, but if I only use units from Order Serpentis, the Cold One Knights become Battleline.

 curran12 wrote:
Well, to answer your questions here.

First, for your armies, your best bet is the AoS app. That contains all the warscrolls, as well as those from expansion books. But instead of buying the whole book, you only need to pay for the warscrolls you want (at about $2 per scroll). The app gives all of the rules for each unit. For your points, you need the General's Handbook, either the physical copy or the app copy (app copy comes with army building built in).

As far as mixing and matching in Match Play (the term used for points play), you can draw from anything under your grand alliance (Order, in the case of Aelfs). However, your army has a required amount of units that are Battleline. For some units, they are always Battleline, but for some Allegiances (aka subfactions in Order), you'll need to meet certain requirements to unlock units as Battleline. The example for me is the Order Serpentis, an Order Allegiance that focuses on Dark Elf dragon units. Normally, it has nothing that is Battleline, but if I only use units from Order Serpentis, the Cold One Knights become Battleline.

Thank you so much for the reply, it is very helpful!

I've been trying to think about what to do with Elves as well - I've got a bunch of Wood Elves and I'm sorely tempted to get a variety of High Elves to go with.

Since you asked about matched play, all this applies to that:

So the downside for both High and Dark Elves is that, in AoS, they've split into many subfactions. For example White Lions and Lion Chariots are in their own, etc. Wood Elves have mostly come out whole, though a few of their units are just gone. On top of the subfactions, each of the three has a few entries in the Compendium section of the GH, which is where they put points for models they no longer make.

To build a matched play list, at each points tier you need a certain number of units that are typed as 'battleline' and if you declare a specific subfaction, often an additional unit or two will get them. For example, Phoenix Guard are battleline if you declare the Phoenix Temple faction - but if you do that, you can't take any units from anywhere else in the Order allegiance, which includes the Swordmasters + Mages, the White Lions, the Shadow Warriors, and on and on. So if you want to play a classic High Elf list, you'd likely go with the Order allegiance, but the problem with that is there's nothing that's battleline without a faction declaration, so you'd have to get your battleline units either from the compendium or elsewhere in Order. My suggestion would be to consider Glade Guard archers, who are at least still elves - if you can't find old High Elf spearmen models or reasonable alternatives.

The other problem with all these splits is that your characters mostly come from subfactions, and they tend to only affect models with keywords from that subfaction. So Phoenix Guard annointed aren't going to buff White Lions, and so on.

And if all that weren't quite enough, the models that made it out of the compendium and into subfactions lost the Exile and Highborn keywords, and so characters from the Dark Elf and High Elf compendium sections won't synergise with them either.

All of which is to say, playing Elves seems a bit hard now (though not impossible) unless you go with Wanderers - and for those, the compendium model and the models in the Wanderers section retained the Wanderers keywords, so there's no real problems there other than model/proxy availability.